Geocentrist: “Mars is a problem, but we need not be strict
about geocentrism.”
We wouldn’t buy the geocentrist’s response because it
amounts to an admission that the theory has no solution to the
problem. I think the same goes for relaxing respect for rights
when the going gets tough for deontology. (In any case, relaxing
one’s principles doesn’t favor deontology over consequential-
ism, because consequentialists can make the same move to get
out of a jam.)
What about the objection that we cannot know which insti-
tutions will have the best long-term consequences? Both theory
and practice have taught us enough about private property,
market prices, and government failure to justify our confidence
that classical liberal institutions produce better results than
the alternatives. Even Hayek, a thinker who worried about the
limits of our knowledge as much as anyone, had little doubt that
liberal capitalism outperforms socialism. Indeed, one of the big
takeaways from the work of people like Hayek, Milton Friedman,
James Buchanan, and Deirdre McCloskey is that we ought to
embrace markets precisely because they make us better off. And
I’ll note that Kuznicki himself agrees that economic and political
freedom makes us happier, healthier, and wealthier.
The consequentialist case for liberty isn’t perfect. But perfec-
tion isn’t on the table. So we should go for the least imperfect
moral theory—and that’s consequentialism.
Reply: Kuznicki to Freiman
THEORIES OF ETHICS all share one goal: to supply logical argu-
ments about right and wrong in support of conclusions that,
in the absence of argument, ordinary human beings would
still find intuitively obvious. One hopes the arguments we sup-
ply help us to refine our intuitions and perhaps to extend our
understanding of right and wrong action into new areas.
That’s a big project. It faces many challenges, including that
ordinary human beings disagree about what’s intuitively obvi-
ous. It should not surprise anyone, then, that even the most
promising lines of argument still contain loose ends and unre-
solved conundrums. Consequentialism and deontology are sim-
ilarly situated in this regard; neither ties everything up neatly in
the way of a geometric proof. As Aristotle wrote, we should not
expect of this subject more precision than it will bear.
As I see it, the advantage of deontology, which at least sets
it above consequentialism, is that deontology harmonizes
much more closely with our existing, pervasive, and seemingly
immovable intuitions. It does not attempt to make ethics look
like a branch of political economy.
Deontology starts, I would say, with something much like the
Golden Rule, an ethical maxim that is by no means unique to the
Judeo-Christian world. It has been discovered or rediscovered
on many occasions in a wide variety of traditions, including
Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and those of the Yoruba
and Igbo peoples of Africa. This gives great credence to deontol-
ogy as a field of inquiry. It suggests that this is not just a thing
invented by a particular culture. It’s a gateway to ethical reason-
ing that is potentially accessible to all.
Theoretical deontologists may be as abstruse and technical
as they please, or not. What matters is that people, to make use
of it, aren’t required to think about ethics in any terribly sur-
prising, new, or counterintuitive way. They don’t need to begin
with complicated math about inscrutable emotions—which, if
we’re being honest, few people ever really attempt—and then
work backward. An individual wishing to be a good person may
begin instead with the Golden Rule, and with what this simple
but powerful statement would do for us if we were to incorporate
it more and more fully into our behavior.
It may seem like a surrender to insist on the importance of
a widely shared intuition in place of a scientistic system. But
that system asks too much of most people, myself certainly
included, in the way of computations. Deontology begins with
the idea that the foundations of ethics must be universal, span-
ning all cultures and time periods, and accessible to all people,
educated or not. No other sort of foundation seems fit to help
shape individual actions in a responsible and publicly defen-
sible manner.CH RIS TO PH ER FREI MAN is the Class of 1 9 63 Distinguished Term A ssociate
Profe ssor of Philosophy at William & Mar y.JASON KUZNICKI is the editor of Cato Books and Cato Unbound.24 OCTOBER 2018
“If I’m often unsure
about how to
maximize my own
utility, how can I
do the same for an
entire society?”